If U.S. imperialism gets its way, during our generation it will commit a gargantuan series of atrocities that take many millions of lives. It could carry out nuclear attacks against one or more of the countries challenging it, repeating its great crimes against the people of Japan with the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In its desperation for recovering its diminishing imperial holdings, it could invade a country like Venezuela or Iran, leading to World War III. It could launch a campaign to exterminate political undesirables within U.S. borders, repeating the mass executions that have taken place under the regimes the CIA has installed. The possibilities for tragedy are historically unparalleled, because this is a mad dog regime that’s more equipped than any past dictatorship to inflict death and destruction. It’s finding itself cornered, and will at some point react by using the full strength of its tools for imperialist violence.
When the German imperialists found their colonial holdings diminished following World War I, and faced with the economic fallout from capitalism’s crises, they reacted by backing the agenda of the Nazis. The Nazis offered to build up Germany’s military strength, to reinvigorate the economy through a racially selective bastardization of “socialism,” to expand the nation’s land access by turning the rest of Eurasia into a ground for colonial conquest. To the capitalists on both sides of the Atlantic who facilitated Hitler’s industry, and to the petty bourgeois Germans who made up fascism’s social base, the madness of Hitler’s drastic plans for aggression didn’t matter. They didn’t care how this would inevitably bring proportionate blowback upon Germany. They sought to eliminate the groups they saw as a scourge upon the white supremacist cause, and to revitalize the German empire by carrying out plunder through any means necessary. And they succeeded, insofar as Germany has never truly had to pay for its crimes and has been able to become one of the richest countries following its military defeat.
The other colonial powers never fundamentally cared about the Third Reich’s atrocities, because they routinely commit mass murder on par with the Holocaust. So they enabled the regime’s rise, and left the cleanup job to the twenty-seven million Russians who died in the war. Then they only selectively held the war criminals accountable, letting numerous former Nazi officials help them found NATO, recruiting Nazi scientists to provide the U.S. empire with intellectual property, and using the Nazis who fled to South America as specialized partners in torturing political dissidents under the U.S.-backed dictatorships.
The U.S. imperialists expect to be able to intensify their violence in the coming decades, while being allowed the same kind of impunity by the other members of the imperialist bloc. Their proxy war against Russia has managed to unify all of the imperialist countries behind Washington’s agenda for a revived Nazi anti-Russian campaign within Ukraine. Every one of these regimes has decided to overlook the ethnic cleansing, anti-democratic policies, and Nazi militia collaboration that the U.S.-installed Kiev leadership has carried out. They’re providing Kiev with all the weapons it needs to continue terrorizing the Russian speakers who Ukrainian nationalists dehumanize. They’re willing to risk a third world war if that’s what it takes to break up Russia, and to subdue China by extension. They’re not going to succeed in this goal of destabilizing Eurasia, and of expanding their decaying colonial project into a new front across the continent. When they realize how futile their Ukraine war effort is, they’ll be willing to enable whatever new horrors Washington tries to cook up.
When it comes to Washington’s backing of the Saudi genocide against Yemen, meddling that’s leading to famine in Ethiopia, sanctions that are leading to famine in Afghanistan, assistance of Israel’s intensifying crimes against Palestine, and broader sanctions and military atrocities, the U.S. empire’s partners in evil have absolutely been standing by it. Washington is taking advantage of capitalism’s converging crises, mainly global warming and the pandemic, to make its warfare more deadly. And no power is able or willing to sufficiently hold it accountable, or to prevent its crimes from continuing.
The biggest anti-imperialist powers, those being Russia, China, and Iran, have been gaining more of an ability to defend themselves and help smaller countries targeted by the imperialists. Iran has allowed Venezuela to defy sanctions through oil transportation, Russia has defended Syria and the Donbass from imperialist threats, and China has been building an economic development network to lift impoverished countries out of the poverty imperialism has engineered. But it’s so far not enough to save the Palestinians, the Yemenis, and the other vulnerable peoples. As the YouTube channel Nova Lectio International recently observed, “Yemen is dying and nobody cares.”
When the imperialists get desperate enough, and their ability to inflict harm upon the globe gets so decrepit that they’re fully kicked out of Asia or other cold war fronts, they’ll turn their violence against the vulnerable peoples within the core. They’ve already been doing so to incremental degrees, intensifying the banal violence of capitalism and colonialism. They’ve funneled weapons from their recent wars into U.S. police departments while training law enforcement in Israeli repressive techniques, leading to a rise in police brutality against minoritized groups. They’ve built a network of concentration camps for the people who’ve been displaced by imperialist meddling in Latin America, separating refugee families and subjecting their children to vile conditions. They’ve neglected aid to the tribes during the pandemic and deliberately mismanaged the health crisis, leading to Black, Indigenous, and other colonized peoples getting disproportionately killed by the virus. By refusing to pay reparations, they’ve doomed impoverished Black communities to be especially damaged by climate-exacerbated disasters.
This war against their own people is always expanding, recently getting intensified when it comes to attacks on LGBT rights and women’s rights. There’s no point at which the situation will stop worsening, not until the settler capitalist state is overthrown and replaced by a post-colonial socialist federation. To defeat the forces of reaction, there needs to be a robust revolutionary organizing apparatus, one that’s equipped to address society’s contradictions, fight off the violence of the reactionaries, and build proletarian democracy. The U.S. empire is doing all it can to prevent this, cultivating fascist militias to terrorize the masses, militarizing the police, and aggressively mobilizing the National Guard whenever serious unrest breaks out. The state is waging a counterinsurgency to keep the masses demobilized, and to keep the destructive engine of empire in motion.
The country’s bourgeois “democracy” is ready to fully give way to a reactionary takeover equivalent to the one Germany underwent during its moment of desperation. The Democratic Party has discredited itself as a force capable of addressing the needs of the people, and the fascists are mobilizing to complete the transition towards unconcealed tyranny. The war machine is intertwined with this process, its operations facilitated by both parties. Now that the Democrats have committed the U.S. towards backing Nazi terror in Ukraine for the sake of scoring geopolitical points, this fascist paramilitarism will be reflected within U.S. borders. The Hitlerite racism Washington is cultivating abroad is furthering the rise of Nazism here, providing a pipeline and training ground for white supremacy. It’s all connected, and it’s all leading towards a catastrophe on this continent which repeats the fascist atrocities of World War II.
Adolf Hitler praised the United States, and took explicit inspiration from it, because it created a working example of mass racist violence for the sake of empire-building. The United States incorporated the Nazis into its postwar operations because the Nazis advanced Washington’s imperial goals. Now that imperialism has reached its final stage of collapse, with capital ever more desperate to suppress the class struggle, the U.S. empire will employ Nazism’s model for waging war against its enemies. If the forces of anti-imperialism don’t defeat it in time, this could bring about destruction as bad or worse than that which the Nazis created.—————————————————————————
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